Download Paper titles and abstracts Dan Arnold: "Perception and the

Paper titles and abstracts
Dan Arnold: "Perception and the Perceptible: Candrakīrti on the Difference an Adjective Makes"
In his most sustained critique of the epistemological project of Dignāga, Candrakīrti argues that
the latter's peculiarly technical usage of the word pratyakṣa cannot make sense of the ordinary
usage, according to which the word is an adjective (and not, as for Dignāga, a noun). Among the
differences this makes is that the ordinary usage of the word recommends (against Dignāga) the
conclusion that perception is always already conceptual. That Dignāga's account cannot be made
consistent with our ordinary epistemic practices is further clarified if we consider what
is "perceptible" for Dignāga; the intuitive plausibility of Dignāga's position is undermined by the
recognition that his account really makes sense only as an idealist account.
Vincent Eltschinger: "Dharmakīrti, Apoha, and the Two Truths"
Dharmakīrti (600?) is well known for his dual system of epistemology: whereas perception relies
on, and is caused by, real particulars, inference deals with conceptual constructs. The theory of
apoha ("exclusion") is meant to account for the relation between perceptuality and conceptuality
in bridging the gap between true but transient cognitions and ultimately erroneous but practically
useful concepts and linguistic expressions. Generally regarded as a theory of language entailing a
complex interplay of negations, the apoha theory has only rarely been addressed for what it really
is, i.e., Dharmakīrti's interpretation of the Buddhist two truths/realities—an exegesis that his
terminological choices make very explicit.
FUNAYAMA Toru: "Non-conceptuality through Repetition of Conceptual Meditation: Kamalaśīla's
Theory of Yogic Perception"
Yogic perception (yogipratyakṣa) was introduced by Dignāga (6th c.) and systematized by
Dharmakīrti (7th c.) in the Buddhist pramāṇa school. However, neither of them figured out any
concrete process or stage for the realization of yogic perception in meditational practice; it
therefore remains unclear whether the above founders treated yogic perception as a mere
theoretical possibility or as deeply rooted in their religious experience. Against this background,
Kamalaśīla (8th c.) remarkably clarified that yogic perception is attained as a result of the longterm repetition of conceptual contemplation of Buddhist truths such as "everything in this world
is momentary," and that this conceptual cognition transforms into a non-conceptual
(nirvikalpaka/kalpanāpoḍha), vivid (spaṣṭa) and direct experience at the moment of entering the
first stage or the stage of joy (pramuditā bhūmiḥ) of the ten stages. This point is related with the
attainability of yogic perception in actual practice. In this paper I will attempt to describe the
essential points of Kamalaśīla's view by presenting significant passages of his Bhāvanākrama III
and Tattvasaṃgrahapañjikā.
Jonardon Ganeri: "Mindedness, Saññā, and the Epistemic Role of Experience"
It is the fifth century Yogācāra philosopher Dignāga who is to be held to account for introducing
into the history of Buddhist philosophy of mind the Myth of the Given, that "fatal dichotomy
between a supposedly brutely given, nonconceptual sensory content and free, rationally
articulated belief" (Carman 2013: 167), when he reduced the role of concepts to pawns in the
game of inference with his celebrated redefinition of perceptual experience as that which is free
from conceptual construction (nirvikalpaka). Bhartṛhari, Dignāga's senior, notoriously defends a
precisely contrary thesis about the priority of language, that linguistic and conceptual ability
pervades perceptual experience. Even a person who is absorbed in walking across a meadow, he
says, and I will return to his example in the next section, will be sufficiently aware of the grass
and the clods of earth as to be able to report them later, although at the time his or her experience
contained only the "seeds of the disposition for speech" (śabdabhāvanābīja) and was not yet
actually conceptually structured (savikalpaka) (Vṛtti on VP I.131). A prominent contemporary
advocate of the Bhartṛhari thesis is John McDowell, for whom "to avoid making it unintelligible
how the deliverances of sensibility can stand in grounding relations to paradigmatic exercises of
the understanding such as judgements and beliefs … we must insist that the understanding is
already inextricably implicated in the deliverances of sensibility themselves" (McDowell 1994:
46). The difficulty McDowell identifies with the idea that the content of perceptual experience is
a bare Given is that such a view leaves us with no explanation of the manner in which experience
can supply reasons for belief and judgement, so "when we trace justifications back, the last thing
we come to is still a thinkable content; not something more ultimate than that, a bare pointing to a
bit of the Given" (1994: 28–9). Perceptual encounters do provide beliefs and judgements with
prima facie justification, and any account of the content of experience must be such as to explain
how that can be the case. McDowell urges that this can be the case only if "distinctively human
experience is actualization of conceptual capacities in sensory consciousness" (2007: 348). So
"mindedness pervades the lives of the rational animals we are, informing in particular our
perceptual experience and our exercises of agency" (2013: 41).
The Theravāda Abhidhamma Buddhist philosophy of mind I will explore agrees with
much of this argument. Like Bhartṛhari, and unlike Dignāga, it retains a firm grip on the idea that
the contents of perceptual experience cannot be normatively inert, but must already have
correctness conditions built in if experience is to have any role in the justification of belief. Part
of my argument will be that we can recover an account of the correctness conditions appropriate
to perceptual content through an analysis of the notions of "felt evaluation" (vedanā) and
"identificatory labelling" (saññā), notions whose centrality is emphasised by classifying them as
both fundamental commitments of consciousness and as distinct members of the five-fold scheme
of aggregates. I will relate the claim that the content of perceptual experience has these two sorts
of correctness condition with the constitutive role of two kinds of attention in experience, the
kinds of attention called "singleness of mind" (ekaggatā) or "absorption" (appanā) and "bringingto-mind" (manasikāra). The constitutive role of absorbed attention is to select phenomenal
properties for felt evaluation in a world of solicitations, while the constitutive role of "bringingto-mind" or focal attention is to access categorical properties for reidentification in a world of
determinate objects. The Buddhist term for the content of perception, ārammaṇa, serves to refer
to both levels of the world disclosed by experience.
Jay Garfield: "Thinking Beyond Thought: Tsongkhapa and Mipham on the Conceptualized Ultimate"
I consider the distinction between don dam rnam grangs ma yin pa and rnam grangs pa'i don
dam (apāryayaparamārtha and pārayayaparamārtha—the noncategorized and the categorized
ultimate) as it is deployed by Tsongkhapa on the one hand and Mipham and Bötrül on the other in
their respective attempts to explicate the distinction between nonconceptual ultimate and
conceptual understanding of ultimate truth. Tsongkhapa argues that the distinction is grounded in
the subject, and Mipham and Bötrül that it is grounded in the object. I argue that Tsongkhapa gets
this roughly right.
Sonam Kachru: "Who's Afraid of Non-Conceptual Content? Rehabilitating Dignāga's Criterion for what
is Perceptually Evident"
This essay offers a new interpretation of Dignāga's appeal to non-conceptual content when
defining perception, or as a criterion for what is perceptually evident. I will present reasons to
eschew the admittedly tempting line of interpretation on which Dignāga was motivated by the
same sorts of considerations which led epistemologists in our own time to speak, whether in
praise or blame, of something 'given'. Once we resist this temptation, and keeping in mind
Dignāga's novel characterization of what conceptuality involves, we might allow ourselves a
fresh reconstruction of the motivations underlying Dignāga's contrast between conceptual and
non-conceptual content. I will propose the following way of putting things. Dignāga's contrast
between conceptual and non-conceptual content might very well be read as part of a
programmatic attempt to tease apart two analytically distinct yet co-present elements that
Dignāga admits are fused in our pre-theoretical conception of experience (exemplifying what is
worth calling 'concrete intentionality'). The two elements, as resolved by Dignāga's criteria of
conceptual and non-conceptual content, are, respectively, the ability to use and respond to reasons,
and phenomenal presence. When evaluating whether or not a mental episode is 'directed' to the
world, the idea of consciousness in experience turns out to be an idle wheel. And when
attempting to isolate what it is in an experience that marks it out as an experience, as, that is, an
instance of consciousness, we must allow that to which we are directed in thought or language to
fall, as it were, out of focus, thereby bringing something else into view. And the analytic work is
not thereby done: what is brought into view, phenomenal presence, turns out to be rather
phenomenologically rich for Dignāga—neither without structure, nor contentless, ultimately
finding its final characterization in Dignāga's gloss on experience being non-transparent and
reflexive. If Dignāga's way of handling conceptual content is novel, so too is his
phenomenological recovery of this domain of phenomenal presence.
KENG Ching: "Does the Cognition of Blueness-cum-Yellowness Involve Vikalpa?"
This paper begins with this question: Why did the Ābhidharmikas insist that sense perception is
accompanied with some minimum sense of vikalpa (i.e., svabhāva-vikalpa), but Dignāga and
later Yogâcāra thinkers deviated from this to insisting that sense perception is without vikalpa
(kalpanāpoḍha)? Intriguingly, it is noteworthy that the Abhidharma and Yogâcāra thinkers also
hold contrasting views about the relationship between sense perception and vitarka: sense
perception is always accompanied by vitarka according to the former, but not at all according to
the latter. Given that the Abhidharmakośabhāṣya identifies svabhāva-vikalpa with vitarka, the
above two contrasts are closely related: For the Abhidharma, sense perception is regarded as savikalpa because it is sa-vitarka.
So then the question is: What is the nature of vitarka in the case of sense perception? And
why does vitarka involve vikalpa in sense perception?
The first possibility of reading vitarka is: Since sense perception does not cognize really
existent entities (dravya)—i.e., atoms (paramāṇu) in the Abhidharmic realist context—but rather
a collection of atoms, sense perception seems to necessarily involve vikalpa. But I argue that this
is not the proper reading because both the Ābhidharmikas and Yogâcārins invent the notion of
sense fields qua particulars (āyatana-svalakṣaṇa) to insist that a collection of atoms still counts as
a particular, and hence there is no vikalpa involved in the sense perception of it.
Different from the previous case, I argue that vitarka should be understood in the case
where a sense field consisting of a dimension, a blueness of a certain length and width for
example, is perceived. In this case, at least two things are necessarily involved: a collection of
sense fields qua particulars and a demarcation of the boundary thereof. For the latter, a distinction
between two colors, say, blueness against the background of yellowness, is necessary. I argue that
this should be taken as the function of vitarka in sense perception: To tell certain blueness apart
from certain yellowness, and in so far as there is a distinction, there is vikalpa involved.
But then how could the Yogâcārins separate this very fundamental cognitive function
from sense perception? This is because they stipulate the notion of mental consciousness
simultaneous with the five sensory consciousnesses (mānasa-pratyakṣa in Dignāga and wuju
yishi 五俱意識 in Kuiji) so that vitarka is ascribed to the mental perception rather than to sense
perception. This is why the Cheng weishi lun claims that the five sensory consciousnesses are
without vitarka but the mental consciousness simultaneous with the five sensory consciousnesses
is. Even with this new Yogâcāra move, vitarka should still be regarded as non-conceptual because
no conceptualization and verbalization is involved, not even the very notions of "blueness" and
"yellowness." Another support for this is that even small kids with no linguistic capability can
still tell blueness apart from yellowness.
I end this paper with a call for a clarification of the term vikalpa. In my understanding,
three different senses should be distinguished: (1) vikalpa qua non-conceptual distinction: e.g., a
distinction of blueness from yellowness; (2) vikalpa qua conceptualization and verbalization: e.g.,
the conceptualization in terms of the language of an entity (dharma) and self (ātman); (3) vikalpa
qua bifurcation: e.g., the bifurcation into the noetic and noematic aspects (darśana-bhāga vs.
nimitta-bhāga; or svâbhāsa vs. arthâbhāsa), as exemplified in the notion of non-discriminating
cognition (nirvikalpa-jñāna). For both Ābhidharmikas and Yogâcārins, the first is harmless for
liberation and hence is usually not made the focus while discussing vikalpa.
Jowita Kramer: "Conceptuality in Yogācāra Thought"
This paper will investigate Yogācāra accounts of "conceptuality" and "non-conceptuality," as
well as the relation between the perceived object and its verbal expression. The process of
thinking and conceptualizing has repeatedly been in the focus of attention of Yogācāra authors
and is discussed in some detail in works such as the *Sūtrālaṃkāravṛttibhāṣa, the
Madhyāntavibhāgaṭīkā and the Mahāyānasaṃgraha. My presentation will focus on various terms
related to these processes including "concept" (vikalpa), "ideation" (saṃjñā), "mental cognition"
(manovijñāna) and "mental talk" (manojalpa) and will also explore Yogācāra interpretations of
non-conceptual (nirvikalpa) states.
LIN Qian: "The Mahānidāna-sūtra and Conceptual Thinking in Early Buddhism"
The Mahānidāna-sūtra is considered one of the most important early sūtras teaching the Buddhist
doctrine of dependent origination (pratītya-samutpāda). However, later Buddhist commentaries
to this sūtra regarding its nine-linked formula of dependent origination, and the interdependency
between consciousness (vijñāna) and name-and-form (nāma-rūpa) have caused inconsistencies
and difficulties in their Abhidharma systems. The first part of this paper examines different
versions of the Mahānidāna-sutta preserved in Pāli and Chinese translations that are related to the
Theravāda, the Sarvāstivāda, and the Dharmaguptaka traditions. The textual comparison of the
variations in the passages describing name-and-form (nāma-rūpa) and the two kinds of contacts
(sparśa) in the sūtra demonstrates how doctrinal positions may influence the forms of the text.
Based on the textual study in the previous part, the second part proposes that the three links in the
formula of dependent origination, namely, consciousness (vijñāna), name-and-form (nāma-rūpa),
and contact (sparśa), may better be understood as a description of a fundamental conceptual
cognitive process underlying not only every mental activity in a sentient being’s life, but also the
coming to be of the sentient being, the beginning of saṃsāra. Such an understanding of these
sūtra passages provides a theory of conceptual thinking different from the one proposed in early
Abhidharma texts, but somehow close to the Yogācāra analysis of the grasper (grāhaka) and what
is grasped (grāhya). Finally, the paper proposes that the interdependent relationship between
vijñāna and nāma-rūpa may be understood as a representational theory of mind.
Patrick McAllister: "A Buddhist Account of the Simultaneity of Perceptual and Conceptual Awareness
Events"
The theory of apoha plays an important role in the epistemological and logical system developed
by the Buddhist Dignāga and his followers in ancient India. It is a solution to the problem of
universals, and posits that any commonness amongst real things is only a function of their
difference: instead of assuming essential and intrinsic properties that things really share, this
commonness is stated to be always reducible to the more fundamental notion of exclusion
(apoha): two things are the same only insofar as they are excluded from a third set of things.
Whilst the ontological and logical aspects of this theory have, by and large, been clarified
in modern scholarship, many of the epistemological problems arising from it have not yet been
understood very well. A central objection is often one from direct experience: How can these
Buddhists claim that a cognition has exclusion as its object, when everything in such a cognition
is presented positively?
From amongst the many complexities in the Buddhists' explanation of this stark
difference between what appears and what is the case, I would like to present an important
element from one of the latest proponents of this strand of philosophy. It pertains to the temporal
structure of a conceptual cognition in which an exclusion is presented as a positive property.
Ratnakīrti, an 11th century Buddhist, insists that the two aspects are simultaneous, and that these
are in fact contained in every event of (unenlightened) awareness, thus somewhat undermining
the traditional Buddhist differentiation of conceptual cognition versus perceptual cognition.
To analyse this material I will be making use of Edmund Husserl's theory of temporal
consciousness: it is well in line with the central Buddhist ontological tenet of momentariness, and
also provides an easy entry point to modern phenomenological approaches to conceptual and
perceptual awareness.
Evan Thompson: "What's In a Concept? Conceptualizing the Conceptual in Buddhist Philosophy and
Cognitive Science"
Is there or can there be nonconceptual experience or is all experience by nature conceptually
structured? Do certain kinds of conscious experiences occur prior to the workings of cognition
(attention, memory, thought) or does the content of a mental event become conscious only by
virtue of the workings of cognition? These sorts of questions have been posed in many different
philosophical contexts, cultures, and languages. In Buddhist philosophy, they are central to
Vaibhāṣika and Sautrāntika controversies about perception (pratyakṣa) and to Pramāṇavāda
accounts of immediate experience (pratyakṣa) versus mental construction (kalpanā). In Indian
philosophy altogether, they lie at the heart of the debates between the Buddhist Pramāṇavādins
and the Nyāya realists. In European and Anglo-American philosophy, they derive from Kant and
inform numerous discussions in both the analytic and phenomenological traditions. They are also
central issues in cognitive science. A reccurent problem in contemporary discussions of these
questions, however, is the lack of a generally accepted account of what concepts are. Clearly, in
the absence of a precise specification of what a concept is, the notion of nonconceptual
experience is equally ill-defined. This problem carries over into the study of Buddhist philosophy.
For example, "concept" is routinely used to translate the Buddhist philosophical term vikalpa, and
"conceptualization" is often used to render kalpanā; accordingly, nirvikalpa is rendered as
"nonconceptual" and kalpanāpoḍha as "devoid of conceptualization." But what exactly does
"conceptual" mean in this context? Does it mean linguistic? Does it mean a recognitional
capacity—the capacity to re-identify something, to cognize it as an instance of a kind or type—a
capacity that need not be linguistic or require the possession of language? Buddhist scholars
sometimes gloss the conceptual (vikalpa, kalpanā) as anything mentally added to the "given," but
this raises the contentious issue of exactly what the "given" is supposed to be. Moreover, the term
"given" is an Anglo-American philosophical term of art. It comes from Wilfrid Sellars (1956),
who argued against what he called the "myth of the given." By this he meant the idea that
anything that was somehow imparted nonconceptually and noninferentially could provide a basis
for knowledge. In calling this idea a "myth," Sellars contended not only that there is no given in
experience but that there cannot be. Buddhist scholars have used Sellars to interpret and evaluate
various Buddhist philosophical views: Tom Tillemans (2003) argues that Buddhist logicians and
Svātantrikas subscribe to the "given," whereas Candrakīrti rejects it as a myth; Dan Arnold
(2012) also reads Dignāga and Dharmakīrti as relying on the notion of the "given," and uses
arguments from Sellars and John McDowell to criticize them; and Jay Garfield (2014) describes
Buddhist philosophy overall as a progressive critique of ever more sophisticated conceptions of
the "given." Nevertheless, despite Sellars's arguments, contemporary philosophers and cognitive
scientists disagree about the nature and role of concepts in experience, and in particular about
whether accounting for experience requires appealing to some notion of nonconceptual content.
This complex, cross-cultural philosophical milieu sets the context for my paper. My main concern
is to call attention to the need for more precision in specifying what "concepts," "conceptual," and
"nonconceptual" mean when we bring Buddhist philosophy into dialogue and debate with
contemporary philosophy and cognitive science. To that end, I will review various cognitive
science views of concepts and relate them to both Abhidharma and Pramāṇavāda accounts of
perception (pratyakṣa) and cognition (vijñāna).
Roy Tzohar: "Enjoy the Silence: The Relation between Non-conceptual Awareness and Inexpressibility
According to Some Yogācāra Sources"
The paper deals with the way in which early Indian Yogācāra treatises understand the relations
between non-conceptual awareness (nirvikalpajñā) and the inexpressibility (nirabhilāpya) of the
true nature of reality. Viewed in light of certain sources, such as the Bodhisattvabhūmi, the
Viniścayasaṃgrahaṇī, the Mahāyānasaṃgraha and the Madhyāntavibhāga along with its
commentaries , these relations may be roughly represented in the following manner: nonconceptual awareness stands for a viable and concrete experience for Yogācāra Buddhists; this
experience is understood as an insight into the inexpressible nature of reality and hence as
validating an ineffable ontology; which at the conventional level can be justified by reasoning
that counters the expressibility of anything (specifically, by attacking a correspondence theory of
truth and culminating with what Garfield and Priest (2003) pointed out as "Limit contradictions").
This description, though consistent, is not as homogenous as one might expect. Different
sections in the same Yogācāra sources reveal a much more intricate set of relations. For instance,
in some instances philosophical argumentation regarding the inexpressibility of reality is
understood not as a mere justification but as itself constituting a practice for bringing about such
realization; in other cases it is seen as neither, since it is understood as a post-factum performance
of the non-conceptual awareness once it has already been acquired by the Bodhisattva.
In this paper I survey these different schemes, explore the possibility they hold for
conceiving philosophical inquiry as both a practice and a performance. and spell out some of the
implications of this view for a question that rings out beyond Yogācāra circles – namely, How, if
at all, can non-conceptual experiences be communicated.
YAMABE Nobuyoshi: "The Position of Conceptualization in the Context of the Yogācāra Bīja Theory"
In the early model of the Yogācāra bīja theory, bīja seems to have been closely associated with
dhātu, which, in this context, refers to the capacity of all the dharmas to generate the same
respective elements in the subsequent moment. These dhātus (=bījas) exist originally and do not
presuppose our act of conceptualization. This early bīja model, however, appears to have been
superseded later by the vāsanā model. Vāsanā here means the residue of our conceptualization
that can give rise to corresponding dharmas at a later time. In this model, conceptualization is the
fundamental basis of the world we live in. This paper will discuss the historical development of
the Yogācāra model of bīja/vāsanā focusing on the role of conceptualization. The significance of
non-conceptual wisdom will also be discussed in the same context.